Simon Berry of ColaLife visits a retailer in Zambia. Photograph: Gareth Bentley for the Guardian

Delivering medicines to remote parts of the developing world by packing them in a crate with Coke bottles might seem like just the sort of fresh thinking aid agencies need.

It was while working in Zambia during the 1980s that Simon Berry first noticed he could buy a bottle of Coca-Cola wherever he went. So, some 25 years later, his charity ColaLife began sending out anti-diarrhoea drugs to isolated villages in the southern African country using the space in the crates.

But eventually, it had to abandon the idea.

“We won all these awards,” says Berry. “We won product design of the year. We won packaging design of the year in the United States.

“We have won health innovation awards and we had to walk away from all of that and do what the market was telling us – and the market was telling us that that idea of putting [medicines in] the crates was very cool but actually not relevant. The real finding was that it wasn’t the space in the crates that was important, it was the space in the market.”

It turned out that because people wanted the health kits, the clever distribution didn’t matter.

The story of ColaLife illustrates how sometimes, despite the best-planned ideas, organisations can be surprised by what lies around the corner.

People wanted to buy, so the crates were redundant. “The relevant thing was that people want it [the kits], it works, and retailers can make a profit.”

Sales continued to rise, and more than 51,000 kits have been sold since September 2012.

“It was worrying initially. We thought, ‘We got all this recognition and actually it is not important’,” says Berry. “But the main thing is saving children’s lives – not being cool and winning awards. We had shown we can have this massive impact by creating a desirable product and getting it out into the shops … but we had the freedom to move away from the idea of fitting [medicines] in crates, because not everyone sells Coca-Cola.”

The need to take note of what the market really wants has also been a salutary lesson for the Irish packaging company JJ O’Toole, which supplies bags to Selfridges, among other retailers.

When a 15% (now 22%) levy on plastic bags was introduced in Ireland in 2002, the company lost 40% of its turnover overnight.

“Nobody thought that it was going to have such an immediate impact,” says the company’s managing director, Vicki O’Toole. “They just didn’t imagine. Overnight [after the levy] people were putting their groceries into trolleys without the bags.”

The drop in revenues meant that some staff had to be laid off but JJ O’Toole eventually went back to its roots, specialising once again in paper. Before the levy, 80% of its sales had been in plastic packaging and the rest in paper. Afterwards, those figures were reversed.

“It came about because we had no choice. It was like reinventing ourselves all over again and quickly finding new sources, new suppliers, new manufacturers,” she says.